With a self-professed “pussy grabber” now living in the White House, you’d think the reactionary douchebags at reactionary douchebag central, Return of Kings, would be feeling pretty chuffed.
Not so much. While Trump signs anti-abortion executive orders and talks about gutting the Violence Against Women Act, the fellas at RoK are worried that feminists are coming for their balls. Chemically speaking, that is.
In a recent post, regular RoK contributor Corey Savage takes a wildly paranoid look at what he calls “10 Feminist Fantasies That Could Become A Reality In The Near Future.”
Ignoring standard feminist fantasies like, let’s say, “getting through a day without some dude on the internet threatening to rape you because you won’t agree that rape culture is a myth” or “setting aside a weekend to binge-watch the 4th season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the third time,” Savage decides to treat us to what seems to be a trip through his weirdest fears, some of which might actually be repressed desires.
So what is Savage worried about? Everything from polyandry to “consent forms” for sex. And did I mention chemical castration?
Here are some of the highlights from his list.
Helping women will become a hate crime:
After complaining about a UK law that supposedly bans men from trying to pick up women in public (it doesn’t, actually), Savage warns his readers, based on absolutely nothing, that such laws
might spread to the rest of the West and expand to include other misogynist offenses including: looking at a woman (what feminists call “stare rape”), calling a trans-woman a he (there’s already a similar law in New York), arguing with women online, manspreading, mansplaining, helping a woman, and so on.
Government-Sponsored Feminist Tribunals
It might be a little tough to convict men of such offenses as manspreading or aggravated woman-helping in a regular court. Savage concludes that the government will therefore set up a whole new court system just to screw over men, a system of feminist “tribunals similar to the kangaroo courts in universities and HR departments at workplaces, all in the name of creating a harmonious society free of hate.”
Non-contact Sex
Consider that we already live in a world where walking past some deranged woman will get you accused of sexual assault. In the future, all physical contact with women may become sternly discouraged or even forbidden that more men will retreat to porn and sexbots as alternatives.
I’m pretty sure that quite a few men (and plenty of non-men as well) already use porn and a wide assortment of sex toys. Also phone sex, sexting, their own vivid imaginations, and so on and so on. “Non-contact sex” has been around as long as “contact sex.”
Bachelor taxes:
An old Men’s Rights favorite boogeyman!
With the drop in number of men who are [marrying] that coincides with the rising number of single mothers who need to leech the welfare state, it’s not too unreasonable to expect a push for bachelor tax that will penalize men who refuse to put a ring on an aging, post-slut sow.
Castration:
Well, “castration” of a chemical kind.
[D]ocile and compliant dogs are the ideal that feminists aim for in their efforts to domesticate men.… If all men are violent hooligans and rapists as some feminists claim, then the next logical step is to let the government control men’s testosterone levels to an “acceptable” level.
And then we come to the camps, and not the fun kind.
Feminist Re-Education Camps:
[I]t won’t be long before men who have been found guilty of misogynist hate crimes to end up in re-education camps. We already have sensitivity training in jobs while colleges are adding courses on toxic masculinity to re-define what it is to be a man on feminist terms. It probably won’t be long before “toxic masculinity” is added to DSM as a mental disorder (in place of homosexuality) and treated like a disease in mental health institutions.
I have to admit that I’m pretty impressed with the way he slipped a little gratuitous homophobia into that last sentence.
Now, if men resist all these evil feminist initiatives, Savage warns, they may well find themselves in even worse kinds of camps. Namely, concentration Camps
No man, no problem! If you’re wondering how feminists could even achieve this, know that there is already an army of goons called the police who will gladly do as they’re told to maintain the gynocentric order.
It’s hard not to wonder if Savage and his Manospherean pals actually live in the same reality as the rest of us.
Here for example, is a piciture of Donald Trump signing an executive order imposing a “global gag rule” that will cut off funding to international organizations that evenso much as mention abortion.
I’m having a little trouble finding the “gynocentric order” in this picture.
I’d be very interested in reading it too.
@EJ, I think you make an excellent point about the connection with capitalism and patriarchy – just think how every time there’s an atrocity people rush to call the perpetrator “crazy”, and it’s feminist voices who always point out that those supposedly “aberrational” lone killers are actually coming straight out of an underlying culture that is generally considered fine and normal.
(re capitalism, they even explicitly rely heavily on a (capitalist) transactional model of personal and especially sexual relations (all those metaphors …) )
@PoM
I appreciate your reply, and I see now where you’re coming from.
I’d counter that the constant attempts by the radical Islamists (at least for the Al-Qaeda and Daesh types; Hamas and Hezbollah are quite different) to reinstate the Caliphate (which many regard as a golden age for Islam, hence the reference to the ‘apex of civilization’ in my original comment) is also a nostalgia-driven goal. And the idea of a Caliphate is of course intimately tied into ideas of religion and nationhood.
Perhaps the relatively recent(-ish) rise to international prominence of such groups, and their successes in taking and keeping power in the Middle East, has shifted the perception to it being a more ‘present-day-focused’ movement founded on present-day grievances.
To be sure, present-day developments have helped to shape the movement as we know it today, and to provide it with the momentum to continue, but it seems to me that a key impetus for action stems from a desire to return to that golden age (and the position of power that this represents).
@ opposablethumbs
It’s ironic that they’ll advocate a ‘sexual socialism’ model when it suits them. Sex is a resource; and one that women have exclusive control over. So we see them saying women should ‘give according to their means to those according to their needs’ i.e. women should ‘give’ Incels sex on demand. There’s even a sort of ‘nationalise women’ thing going on with the idea of state funded sex work.
@Ariblester
If it’s nostalgia that motivates AQ & Daesh & etc., then it’s religious nostalgia, which is mainly religion. Religion is a fantastic motivator, and has driven many devastating wars. Religion plays a much more subdued role in white Western men. The more religious the sub-group of white nationalists, the more motivated and violent they tend to be.
But it’s still present-day events that are the impetus for Middle Eastern violence. OSL was motivated by Soviets in Afghanistan, and then by Americans in Medina. He wasn’t dreaming of a caliphate until AQ was already underway. Daesh was responding to political unrest caused by the occupation of Iraq. They didn’t just pop up out of nowhere with this nostalgia-based goal. Nostalgia doesn’t motivate very well and it also doesn’t make people aggregate into groups.
@Alan Robertshaw
There’s something faintly hilarious about this. I have this vision, in a sort of 70s TV filter, of a bunch of guys queueing up at a desk where a bored, rubbergloved individual provides the legal 5 minutes of government handjob whilst asking them what they’ve done this week to find genuine human contact, and reminding them that their sexdole can be revoked if they don’t make any such efforts.
Maybe it’s just the term ‘sexdole’.
@ariblester:
That’s a good point. MRAs see everything as existing in a state of mutual coercion, rather than cooperation.
I’d argue that this is also something we see a lot in our everyday lives. It’s the way companies act with respect to the use of their brands, for example. The difference is that most people understand that it doesn’t apply directly to interpersonal relationships.
(I can’t remember enough Kropotkin to quote it here, but I feel that he’d probably have something useful to say on the manner. If someone here can remember their Kropotkin, please jump in.)
@opposablethumbs:
Yeah, precisely.
I’m not a philosopher and I should probably run this past a philosopher so that I can phrase it properly.
@Alan:
I’d be very happy to read it when it’s done.
Sexual capitalism and sexual socialism are both corollaries of seeing sex as a scarce resource for which there is competition. Once someone has adopted that paradigm, it’s no surprise that they switch rapidly between different resource-allocation models.
@EJ
Very much yes. I have relevant experiences when it comes to applied social aggression and dominance. Finding really good generalizations is challenging, it’s an impulse thing.
I believe that is a huge chunk of the Tourette’s Syndrome stuff I’m trying to figure out how to express as a kind of troll conflict manual is involved. It’s a little social pattern detector that pulses from some anatomical location (s) that not only looks for specific things that appear, but notices when they are not there because they are accustomed to interacting with them. I often say dominance displays and aggression because those are the closest words that work.
In my head I turn “microaggressions” into “maintenance dominance behaviors that maintain compliance and prevent the necessity of of really intense dominance behaviors later”. This is the part where I creep myself out for a while too.
@Alan Robertshaw: I had a frustrating discussion where I tried to explain what exactly an ‘incel’ was, back after Elliot Rodgers did what he did. It had come up in a discussion, someone had asked for clarification on the term, and the guy who was describing it was doing a piss poor job.
I told them it was someone who thought they were being kept celibate involuntarily, and who felt they were owed sex as a right. And that sex wasn’t a right.
The fella who was originally trying to explain it got a look on his face, and said “Wellll, I don’t know about that….”
He’s an asshole, but (to my knowledge) doesn’t consider himself an incel. So there is also this strange acceptance of the idea by people who aren’t involved that also crops up, and needs to be dealt with.
Lots of really interesting discussion happening here, thank you all for sharing your thoughts!
@Alan,
Not quite, I think. It’s not that women have a resource. It’s that woman are a resource. They’re complaining that the “resource” is harder to “acquire” for them than it is for others. It’s not fair, in a very Conservative concept of what “fair” means.
That’s my take on it, anyways.
That’s a great explanation. May I steal it?
@EJ
By all means. I want people to find it useful. I habitually expend all of that energy figuring out how to think about and control my impulses and it’s nice to know that it’s useful to others.
OMG. I went to the archived ROK and there was a hilarious racist hand-wringing piece by one Kyle Trouble, a 25 yo American who lives “abroad”, apparently here in Finland.
A local beauty contest in Helsinki was won by a black woman from Nigeria! The travesty! Psychological white genocide! Jury shenanigans! And there’s almost no public information of her immigration status and life accomplishments! How shady! Basically like illegals back home in California! What if she eventually becomes Miss Finland and represents the country for Universe!
Actually, almost nobody cares about beauty contests below national level. I didn’t even know there was one in Helsinki. When I googled the woman’s name, the results were a bunch of mentions in tabloids and discussion forums. She’s apparently receiving harassment, so local racists must have picked up this “controversy”.
Trouble seems to think that this “favoritism” of “ethnic” contestants is a very recent phenomenon. As a recent immigrant himself(natch), he may not be aware that a (half) black woman won Miss Finland in the 1990s. Generally speaking, Finnish modeling industry is still whiter than the crowd at Trump’s inauguration.
He also claims that 80% of Finns are blonde, as if that makes a big difference in whiteness compared to Nigerians. That figure is maybe true, if you count watery brown as “blonde”. Trouble’s own hair seems more blackish in his profile photo, BTW.
@ scildfreja
Well for them ‘women = sex’ and have no other value; so in a way it amounts to the same thing perhaps?
I can’t buy that equivalency, Alan. Not that I’m attacking your position! It may seem like semantics, but it really isn’t.
(or well, it’s still semantics, but those semantics are important.)
If women control sex, it implies a position of authority and control which society doesn’t actually give them. It makes women into gatekeepers and arbiters, and plays into the idea that women can be “unfair” in the distribution of the resource. It implicitly agrees with the MRAs.
Women are sex, according to society. It’s top of the list for the evaluation of the worth of a woman, and her agency doesn’t really come into play. A sexy woman who refuses to dispense sex (to focus on something else she finds important) is still sexy, and still defined by sex, regardless of her other qualities. Her control over her sexuality isn’t part of that equation – even when society values assertive (i.e. controlled) sexuality, it’s just as a modifier to the sexuality itself.
Women don’t control sex, and they aren’t gatekeepers, nor do men see them as that – they only say that as a balm to soothe themselves when they don’t get the prize they want. The actual behaviour of men is that women are the commodity of sex and emotional support. Control of those personal traits doesn’t factor in.
In my opinion, that’s just my take on it.
And when thinking about microaggressions in that light a picture of macroaggressions starts to form and other depth to the senses involved. I can’t help thinking in these terms and I was using ideas about maintenance dominance behaviors in my interactions during the atheist/skeptic schisms (schism always feels wrong because no one died, but it’s consistent). I believe the concept helps in seeing some of the commonalities in different sorts of bigotry, but my data set is basically my impressions of when I can tell that I have been useful (or am told, it gets complicated politically for good reasons).
There are other little things like how Lewis’s law,
…is a specific within a general category. Challenging racial epithet use and other microaggressions attracts similar attention among my fellow white people. A spattering a dominance displays from a set of the public that I try to define by behavior.
I don’t want to figure this stuff out sometimes because it can make you depressed about people in general, but there is no other way of fixing it and I’m sure the social solutions will have repeated social behaviors involved too (it give some hope of making the functionally effective solution positive as well as negative feeling).
Sorry I haven’t been able to comment more on what you’re saying, Brony – it’s really excellent. You’ve always had an incisive clarity that I’m positively jealous of. You describe the social undercurrents of dominance and aggression very well, and I’m looking forward to your synthesis a lot. Your discussion about microaggressions being maintenance actions actually integrates pretty well into the way that men (and boys) interact with one another. Women and girls as well, of course, but in a different way. I’m gonna keep that in mind for awhile, I think; maybe it’ll help me out. Thank you.
@Scildfreja:
Interestingly, a lot of MRAs (such as this cringingly-white essayist) have argued that woman are the gatekeepers of sex, and that they control it to the detriment of all men.
@ scildfreja
Heh, you always give me something to think about.
I know, @EJ. That’s why I said that they do say that women are the gatekeepers of sex. It’s just not how they behave. They say it because it displaces blame from themselves (not being good enough to get the sex they want) to women-in-general (for being unfair in their sex distribution).
In actual interactions, though, they don’t treat women as gatekeepers or sex-controllers – women are the thing-to-possess, not the person-dispensing-the-thing. Calling women “gatekeepers” suggests that they have an agency which society frequently denies, and I don’t think it’s right to ignore that.
Awww, thanks, @Alan :3
Very interesting discussions you’re having here. The link between capitalism and patriarchal notions is something I’ve been very briefly touching on a couple of times while analyzing the similarities and differences between social Darwinist ideas as they manifest in free market capitalist rhetoric and as they manifest in Nazism, fascism and similar philosophies. There are many underlying themes that run so deep that even many of our seemingly benign cultural ideals are practically drenched in them. That the themes manifest in everyday tropes and archetypes that repeat the same lessons over and over is how society has effectively created a fail-safe mechanism against fundamental social change.
Anyway, too tired from studying to elaborate on my own hypotheses. Keep on being awesome.
I’m sorry, I misunderstood you, Scildfreja. That’s a very subtle and interesting point.
The difference between people’s declared beliefs and their revealed beliefs is a very interesting one.
@Scildfreja
No apologies necessary. Why apologize? It’s nice but there is no requirement.
@Scildfreja
Hmmm…..expectations and apologies are complicated for many here. I should have seen that in the question. I do not expect an answer. If I am right here I apologize. I blunder on these things too easily.
I had worried that I wasn’t being clear originally, @EJ! I hope it’s more clear now. I think a lot about that divide between declared and revealed beliefs, because it’s so prevalent and so important – people almost never say what they believe or believe what they say. Digging through the strata of belief is a chore!
@Brony, consider it a maintenance microdegression 😀
@Scildfreja
Also I apologize if I am right or not. That is also a distinction I should have made. It’s important it could have run into something.
Being consistently non-sloppy is challenging but I try to be creative.